SOPA Blackout January 18

I will be joining the website blackout that Reddit is planning on January 18 and that Wikipedia is considering joining HAS JOINED the protest with dozens if not hundreds of others who have already joined in protest of SOPA.

I apologize for any inconvenience that you suffer because you are unable to read the promised goodies on my site that teh interwebz have promised you and tantalized you with via whatever search engine caused you to find my blog.

I’ll be back the 19th.

As the saying goes (at least here in the US), “Had this been an actual emergency,” there would be no guarantee that the site would return a day later.

In brief, the SOPA law would allow the takedown of any website accused of copyright violation, without due process. No one would need to prove that an actual violation had occurred, the accusation itself would be enough. While I am careful to give credit where it is due (after all, I don’t live in a vacuum, and while my ideas are sometimes clever, the are often rooted in work someone else has done), and to honor the copyrights of others, any site is vulnerable if this misguided law is enacted.

Copyright violations are a real problem, but SOPA is not a real solution.

Here endeth the SOPA soapbox.